However, on visiting http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222, and searching for “10.3”, the phrase doesn’t appear. Does that imply that there’s no security content? Does it mean there is security content but you’re not telling us about it?

Really, I don’t feel like thinking about the latest terms of service today if I don’t have to. I’d prefer not to get your latest features which let you sell more and bundle in your latest ideas about what a music player ought to do. But I’m scared. And so I’d like to ask: Is there security content in iTunes 10.3.1?

The headline of this article is the obvious reason. Microsoft might not know they’re doing it for that reason. Usually, people with the need to do something, dammit because they fear they might be headed to irrelevancy think of something and follow the old Aristotelian syllogism:

Something must be done.
This is something.
Therefore, it must be done.

It’s pure logic, you know. This is exactly how Britney Spears ended up with Laurie Anderson’s haircut and the US got into policing China’s borders. It’s logical, and as an old colleague used to say with a sigh, “There’s no arguing with logic like that.”

Come on, let’s look at what happens. I run a business, and there’s a law that says that if my overseas partners aren’t paying for their Microsoft software, then Microsoft can sue me, what do I do?

Exactly right. I put a clause in the contract that says that they agree not to use any Microsoft software. Duh. That way, if they haven’t paid their Microsoft licenses, I can say, “O, you bad, naughty business partner. You are in breach of our contract! I demand that you immediately stop using Microsoft stuff, or I shall move you from being paid net 30 to net 45 at contract renegotiation time!” End of problem.

And hey, some of my partners will actually use something other than Windows. At least for a few days, until they realize how badly Open Office sucks.

Nature reports that Quantum Cryptography has been completely broken in “Hackers blind quantum cryptographers.” Researcher Vadim Makarov of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology

constructed an attack on a quantum cryptography system that “gave 100% knowledge of the key, with zero disturbance to the system,” as Makarov put it.

There have been other attacks on quantum cryptography, but this is the first in which there is no indication that the key has been stolen. In those attacks, the operator of the system would see the transmission error rate go up, but in Makarov’s attack, the operator sees nothing. In short, they are completely, utterly defeated. The attacker gets everything with impunity.

As usual, the quantum crypto crowd doesn’t see that a 100% loss of key with no inkling of the loss is a problem. Makarov himself said to Nature, “If you want state-of-the-art security, quantum cryptography is still the best place to go.”

Perhaps the kicker is this in Nature’s article:

Ribordy [CEO of ID Quantique] and Zavriyev [Director of R&D at MagiQ] stress that the open versions of their systems that are sold to university researchers are not the same as those sold for security purposes, which contain extra layers of protection. For instance, the fully commercial versions of IDQ’s system also use classical cryptographic techniques as a safety net, says Ribordy.

Huh? We can trust commercial versions of quantum crypto because it uses classical crypto as a safety net? That’s saying that the quantum coolness is really just icing over a VPN. Isn’t it? Am I missing something?

Now it’s time for a rant. Quantum cryptography is really, really cool technology, but the whole point of it is, well, security, and if the state of the art is that the system is breakable, then the art is in a sorry state. It’s a state of being a research toy, not a real security system.

The whole point of quantum crypto is that it isn’t even really crypto. It’s communications that can’t be eavesdropped on. It’s a magical tour-de-force of science and technology. But if it can be silently thwarted, it’s no good. If there is no way that it can be tested to be good, it’s no good. Moreover, the latter is more important than anything else.

For quantum crypto to be viable and trusted, we have to have some way that we know that the boxes were designed and manufactured in such a way that we can be confident that there’s no silent quantum backdoor in the box, then it has no value. You might as well just get a VPN router from the usual suspects and be done with it. If you’re really paranoid, just lay down some glass fiber and put it in a conduit.

Quantum information science as a discipline needs to start taking security seriously. It can’t just brush off a break of this magnitude, and remain credible. Come on, at least admit this is serious and has to be reflected in the manufacturing and testing. Come up with countermeasures, something.

In defending employers’ use of credit checks as part of the hiring process, Eric Rosenberg of the TransUnion credit bureau paints a sobering picture. […]

Screening the backgrounds of employees “is critical to protect the safety of Connecticut residents in their homes and offices, in their cars and in all other places they travel,” Mr. Rosenberg testified to Connecticut legislators in February 2009, explaining why TransUnion markets its credit reports to employers.

Trouble is, researchers say there is no evidence showing that people with weak credit are more likely to be bad employees or to steal from their bosses, a fact that Mr. Rosenberg himself later admitted.

“At this point we don’t have any research to show any statistical correlation between what’s in somebody’s credit report and their job performance or their likelihood to commit fraud,” he said in separate testimony to Oregon legislators in January.

But please keep sending Transunion your money, they really like your money, and it makes them happy.

Businesses would actually be better off sending their money to TransUnion and not getting the credit report: that way, all those people they reject for the wrong reasons would still be in their hiring pools.

Businesses would be even better off spending their money on something that protects them or their customers.

In their quest to identify creditworthy customers, some are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal in the virtual stratosphere. Before calling the privacy police, though, understand how it’s really being used.

…
To be clear, creditors aren’t accessing the credit reports or scores of those in your social network, nor do those friends affect your personal credit rating. Jewitt asserts that the graphs aren’t being used to penalize borrowers or to find reasons to reject customers, but quite the opposite: “There is an immediate concern that it’s going to affect the ability to get a financial product. But it makes it more likely” that it will work in their favor,” says Jewitt. [vice president of business development of Rapleaf, a San Francisco, Calif., company specializing in social media monitoring.]

I’ll give Jewitt the benefit of the doubt here, and assume he’s sincere. But the issue isn’t will it make it more or less likely to get a loan. The issue is the rate that people will pay. If you think about it from the perspective of a smart banker, they want to segment their loans into slices of more and less likely to pay. The most profitable loans are the ones where people who are really likely to pay them back, but can be convinced that they must pay a higher rate.

The way the banking industry works this is through the emergent phenomenon of credit scores. If banks colluded to ensure you paid a higher rate, it would raise regulatory eyebrows. But since Fair Issac does that, all the bankers know that as your credit score falls, they can charge you more without violating rules against collusion.

Secretive and obscure criteria for differentiating people are a godsend, because most people don’t believe that it matters even when there’s evidence that it does.

Another way to ask this is, “if it’s really likely it will work in my favor, why is it so hard to find details about how it works? Wouldn’t RapLeaf’s customers be telling people about all the extra loans they’re handing out at great rates?”

Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir have released a paper showing that they’ve broken KASUMI, the cipher used in encrypting 3G GSM communications. KASUMI is also known as A5/3, which is confusing because it’s only been a week since breaks on A5/1, a completely different cipher, were publicized. So if you’re wondering if this is last week’s news, it isn’t. It’s next week’s news.

The paper isn’t up on IACR’s Eprint archive yet, but copies of it are circulating around privately. I’m writing about it with Adi Shamir’s permission.

KASUMI is a modified version of the MISTY cipher. The KASUMI designers made MISTY faster and more hardware friendly by changing the key schedule and modifying some internal parameters. However, they also made it vulnerable to related key attacks.

Of all the weaknesses that a cipher can have, related key attacks are the ones to worry about least. Operationally, crypto engineers know that they should never reuse keys and when in doubt just pull another one off of the random number generator. Consequently, this doesn’t mean that the guys at Weizmann Institute of Science are listening to 3G calls.

Nonetheless, related key attacks are bad to have because implementers do screw up, and related key attacks indicate that the cipher designers didn’t have as tight a handle on things as they thought they did. It is no cause for panic, but it is no cause for either warmness or fuzziness (particularly since the DKS team point out that the KASUMI designers wrote that they’d taken care of related-key issues when they simplified MISTY into KASUMI).

Moreover, the attack here is completely practical. Here is a quote from the abstract:

In this paper we describe a new type of attack called a sandwich attack, and use it to construct a simple distinguisher for 7 of the 8 rounds of KASUMI with an amazingly high probability of 2?14. By using this distinguisher and analyzing the single remaining round, we can derive the complete 128 bit key of the full KASUMI by using only 4 related keys, 226 data, 230 bytes of memory, and 232 time. These complexities are so small that we have actually simulated the attack in less than two hours on a single PC, and experimentally verified its correctness and complexity. Interestingly, neither our technique nor any other published attack can break MISTY in less than the 2128 complexity of exhaustive search, which indicates that the changes made by the GSM Association in moving from MISTY to KASUMI resulted in a much weaker cryptosystem.

It will be interesting to see the response from the GSM Association. They have the opportunity to show leadership. If they recognize that this is a real problem, reassure us that it’s not a catastrophe, and show that they’re taking it seriously, then this can be an all-around good thing for them and us.

We’re all adults (well, okay, most of us are adults and act like adults some of the time), and if we know that there will be an upgrade in a few years, then that’s great. We lived through the WEP issues. We are living through the SSL evil proxy issues. This is less acute than either of those. But we need to have some assurance that in a few years, we’ll just get wireless devices with a safety net. Their challenge is to have a response before this news metastasizes into a common perception that 3G crypto is worthless.

Photo “bag_contents” courtesy of openfly. Selected because it looked good and it was the only photo that came back on a search of “3g crypto.”

Since there’s been so much discussion about the Chrismas Bomber, I want to avoid going over the same ground everyone else is. So as much as I can, I’m going to try to stick to lightly-treaded ground.

This is a failure for the terrorists. A big one. Think about it; put yourself on the other side of the chessboard and read this movie-plot description. Yemeni Al Qaeda has a newly-radicalized, rich engineering student who wants to strike a blow against the evilness of George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. Despite being ratted out by his father, the student gets a visa, likely because he’s “wealthy, quiet, unassuming.” Using the very clever tactic of getting on a plane in Africa and transferring onto an American flight, he has one of the most powerful high explosives known sewn into his pants. Before landing in MoTown, he — fails to detonate it. Think about that again. An engineering student from one of the best universities in the world fails to set off a bomb in his lap. Worse, he ended up with a fire in his pants, leading to many humiliating jokes.

Fail, fail, fail. Epic fail. Face-palm-worthy epic fail. Worse, the US is sending counter-terrorism folks to Yemen to help find the people who planned this epic failure. For them, this is just bad, and about as bad as it gets. Supposedly, recruit these guys with promises of a half-gross of virgins, not with burning their nuts off. Ridicule is one of the most powerful forces there is, and this is deserved.

On top of this, now that the would-be bomber has been captured, he is singing like the proverbial canary. So that means that the planners really should be looking for new places to stay, because even their allies will want to purge losers from their ranks, or at least not take the fall for them.

Yet, all is not lost for the forces of terrorism. The world’s security services have panicked and instituted to security procedures that will actually make it easier for the next person by setting up rules that everyone’s supposed to stay in their seats in the last hour of flight. But that’s pretty slim pickings for them. It’s not even as good as the one-last-shocker in the traditional horror film.

Defense-in-Depth Works. The major problem in fighting terrorism is that the fraction of figure to ground is between six and nine orders of magnitude. If you look at it as a signal processing issue, that’s -60 to -90 decibels of signal in noise.

Any detection system has to deal with false positives and false negatives. In the counter-terrorism biz, that means you have to deal with the inevitability that for every terrorist, you’ll be stopping tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocents. And remember as well, the times that the terrorist is not actually on a terror mission, they’re innocents.

So yeah, the guy was on a watch list. So are a million other people. (And yes, this is a reason why we need to trim the watch list, but that’s a different issue and has a different set of problems.) (And yes, yes, those million other people are only the US citizens on the list.) This still leaves the problem of what they’re supposed to do when some rich guy complains that his son has fallen in with the wrong crowd.

Here are some hard questions: Do we search every kid who pissed off a relative? Do we search everyone who ever went to Yemen? Damascus? How about people who change planes? Travel in carry-on? Have funny underwear?

The answer is that we can’t do that, and even if we do, we merely teach the bad guys how to adapt. The point of defense-in-depth is that you stack a series of defenses, each of which is only a partial solution and the constellation of them works, not any given one. Airport screening worked some — he didn’t get in a good detonator. Passenger resistance worked some — once there was a firecracker-like explosion and a fire, they saved the plane. Defense-in-depth in toto worked.

This is not the reason to disband DHS. This is not the reason to sack Napolitano. Note that I did not say that DHS shouldn’t be disbanded. Nor did I say that Napolitano shouldn’t be sacked, merely that if you’re looking for a reason, this isn’t it.

If we look at what happened and think about what we could do better, DHS isn’t involved. The visa issue is the one to examine and DHS doesn’t give out visas, State does.

My criticism of DHS is that they flinched. They’ve put up these brain-dead stupid policies that are going to annoy travelers and are as likely to make us less safe, not more safe. They should have said that the system worked and there will be no changes so have a happy new year and stay calm.

I am willing to cut them a bit of slack, but if they don’t change their tune to “Keep Calm and Carry On,” then there will be a reason to start demanding heads. Sending people to Yemen was the right response. No headphones on the plane is the wrong one.

If DHS and TSA want to give people reason to call for firings and disbandings, they should keep doing what they’re doing now, not then.

Life is Risk. Keep calm and carry on is good advice for the rest of us, too. The vast majority of us are more likely to be struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark than we are to be a victim of a terrorist. Nonetheless, there are bad, crazy people out there. Sooner or later, no matter what we do, somethings’s going to happen. A plane will go down, a ship will have a bomb on it, a train will be attacked, or something will happen.

The actual risk of terrorism is so low that most adaptations are worse than the threat. More people died in traffic accidents as a result of shunning airplanes after 9/11 than in the actual attacks. After those attacks, the best terrorist second punch would have been a simple suicide bomber in the airport security lines.

When we wring our hands because we think that risk should be zero, we’re part of the problem, too. Schneier is right: we need more investigation and counter-terrorism and less security. Kudos to CNN and Maddow for airing a bit of reason.

So we should all thank our lucky stars that PETN isn’t as easy to detonate as we’re told. We should thank the same stars for passenger resistance. And we should breathe a sigh of relief for an incident that was botched so badly it’ll make others think twice or three times or more. And while you’re at it, don’t play with sharks in a thunderstorm.